In Lyon, they saw it early. Long before the wider game started talking about Rayan Cherki as the heir to Europe’s great playmakers, his talent was already unsettling the people charged with shaping it.
Pierre Sage worked with Cherki across Lyon’s academy and first team and never doubted what he was looking at. Others did.
“It was a process with him, because a lot of people thought that he would not have success in his career,” Sage recalled, reflecting on their time together as he looked ahead to Friday’s clash in South London. “I did not have this same thought. I explained to him: ‘You have a big talent, and I think you can show it in special contexts’. And he did that in his last game against Bournemouth.”
That Bournemouth performance has only sharpened the focus. City executives have already ring-fenced Cherki in their long-term planning, identifying the Frenchman as the player to one day take on Kevin De Bruyne’s mantle and drive the club’s attacking imagination from midfield. It is an audacious projection, but those who know him best speak in the kind of terms usually reserved for the game’s rarest minds.
Sage talks about the balance that had to be built into Cherki’s game. The non-negotiables. The work without the ball that would allow his outrageous talent with it to flourish on the biggest stage.
“You have to give something for the team defensively and keep your talent in attack,” he said. “I had nothing to say to him offensively because he understood the play better than me. To control him, the best thing is to prevent all the passes to him, because when he has the ball he is able to do things we don't imagine.”
That last line could double as a scouting report and a warning. Block the supply, or brace yourself.
Inside City, the plan is clear: let Cherki grow into the role De Bruyne has defined for a decade. Not as a copy, but as the next great reference point for their football. Vision, final pass, invention between the lines – all the traits that have come to symbolise the Belgian are now being mapped onto the young Frenchman’s development curve.
Cherki, for his part, has called Sage a footballing genius. The compliment made its way back to his former coach, who pushed it straight back across the table.
“I don’t know the word for higher than a genius. I am not a genius; he is a genius,” Sage said, the admiration unmistakable. “To speak about something and to teach something is a step. But to do these things is another step. He is at this level. Maybe God?”
Hyperbole? Perhaps. But it captures the sense of what is at stake. A club preparing for life after one era-defining playmaker. A coach who has seen, up close, how another might be ready to write the next chapter.
